Venepoetics

2.25.2018

I don’t subvert myself in my long repose. I don’t break the lair that hides me. I don’t want the days to warm my face. I don't pine for the angel of lost vision. I don't pray to the gods that sustain my speech. I don’t want the spaces and the fixed rooftops, nor the vast lodgings full of signals. I don’t want to see where my highest memory nests.

2.10.2018

I am here in the dark with my back to the light, forgetting the beginning, the day’s eternity. I am here ignored, the profile of my face lost in the shade. I am here diminished, barely a line, a point with no terrain. I am here leaning letting the night pass through me. Outside the immense eagles battle the wind in space. I am here waiting… And I gather my gestures, and my breath retreats, I muzzle my voice and all of me is an occult silence amidst the dark. I am here vigilant, keeping vigil fearfully for a wandering creature that has stopped within me.

1.04.2018

This indefatigable ascent, and my arms tied, and my foot sinking, sinking into the abyss. I’m full of froth, coarse powders, ashes. Time slowly pulled out my hair. Final plans are dragged away by oblivion. My soul grows giant in dilated flight. Oh the blood that flows with no measure, infinite. Oh the blood that runs, escapes in the air, the blood of my origin lost already in the depths.

12.24.2017

I was wandering dressed by the wind’s flow. I was naked girded by the air. I was moving without realizing I was being dragged by its immobile semblance. I was wandering by the open channel. I was passing by ancient skies always bordering the shores of grief. I was listening to the already consumed beating of another heart.

12.09.2017

Open the spaces. Let the weightless matter slip through your fingers. Stretch the arc over your dreams. Stop in front of swollen time. Remember your distant irradiation, you, the forgetful one. Drop the nets over the sea in fires. The Tributary will arise from the ruins. He will come to extinguish your sleepless thirst. No, don’t bow. Don’t give in. The day is tall. Tall light. Don’t let the edge of the shade graze you.

11.18.2017

Where is the barely initiated spacious curve? Where is the exiled sun? This pale glow holds the secret to everything that’s been lost. Vacillating light, fearful of illuminating my darkness, of touching the limits of the quiet ordering of the shade.

11.12.2017

Have the doors of death been revealed to you,
And have you seen the doors of the shadow of death?
JOB: 38:17

When we wandered the roads that seemed so open, we traveled with a desire as though a dense shade were pursuing us. The light was uncertain, in its beginning, in the ignored initiation. As we advanced without touching the air, the air was an augury, the morbid breath was already on its way from the depths. When we stopped, the resounding names, the refulgent space filled up with dust.

10.08.2017

The modern poet speaks from insecurity.
He has no other foundation but life. A still voice probably speaks to him from inside: The era of causes is over. You can’t cling to religions, ideologies, movements, not even literary ones. Flags are finished. But this disillusion frees him to struggle in another key for what religions, ideologies, movements claim to defend: the religious, the human, what is valid.
That voice, so much like nihilism, could actually be the voice of life trying to bring us back.

What else do we expect from poetry but for it to make our living more alive?

Maybe the fragmentation of the world leads to the fragment, or on the contrary, to the ordering work. Right now I’m inclined toward this form of expression, what emerges unpretentiously alongside our days.

A man in an apartment in this city or in any other, struggles with words. He is one of thousands; I don’t know the proportion. Maybe there are others in other apartments, but there’s no clearer evidence: modern society long ago condemned the man of letters, the man with a passion for words, to a growing exile, but at the same time he has lost his voice. He can’t express himself. He lacks a language. He depends on clichés, stereotypes, noise.

A people without an awareness of language end up repeating the slogans of swindlers; in other words, they die as a people.

Readers of poetry seek, in the end, revelations.

Poetry can accompany man, who is now more alone than ever, not to console him but to make him truer. That’s why it tends to be dry, hard, sober. Besides, what consolation could there be?

A man who says or speaks himself with words full of angles, in a language close to the everyday (in the past it had to be “sublime”), this is the poet.

Poets don’t convince.
They don’t conquer.
Their role is another, far from power: to be contrast.

The poet lives far from the world where ideocracy rules.

I don’t distinguish between life, reality, mystery, religion, being, soul, poetry. These are words to designate the unnameable. The poetic is the life of all that, feeling what those words try to say.

I am prose, I live in prose, I speak prose. Poetry is there, not somewhere else. What I call prose is the speech of living, which is always cut through by mystery.

Why do we have to write poems?
We’re always expressing ourselves.
There are so many forms.
Living, while dreaming, laughing, being silent, in a conversation, a class, a gesture, a phrase.

He who speaks in a written text is absent; you can’t interrupt him, ask questions, make observations, comments. It’s a very peculiar dialogue of two solitary people, but so much more alive sometimes than many of our own conversations.

Modern poetry finds itself to a certain degree drowning in style, because of its precepts, though unformulated, more rigorous than traditional ones, for wanting to say without saying, which shouldn’t be confused with “parlar coperto,” because it frequently situates itself in an intransitiveness beyond the hermetic.

9.03.2017

It’s rained all morning. The seagulls sit on the beach and are eventually overcome by flight. Along with the sun, the wind, the cold, now the earth can heat us up. The wheat field shines once more against the house with the white balconies on the hill that trembles again. There will be some kind of warmth —wrapped amber, splintered shade or the image with no sparkle?— for the bodies sprawled out on the sand. At slow sunset we’ll float on the pink, violet water; we’ll watch the final clarity: the sky, the rocks, the blueish harp amid the pines. Not the flourishing seas of summer; not the burning gold of desire; not the reverberation, the vast skin, the vine shoots, jubilation. But this too will be our memory one day: Perbes and its changing, humid glow. How solitude invades the page with discretion, an obsession. ¡Qu’a man tembrosa n’o papel sô escriba ¡palabras, e palabras, e palabras!

7.26.2017

There will be no Rómulo Gallegos Prize this year, which for many people is further proof of the destruction of the public sector that manages art and culture in Venezuela. “Institutions have been de-naturalized, the museums, the libraries, they are no longer what they were,” points out Antonio López Ortega, Venezuelan novelist, essayist and well-known cultural consultant, for whom the most surprising thing about all this is that, despite all the problems in recent years, the quality of creation in Venezuela remains intact. His words immediately reminded me of Ednodio Quintero, born in 1947 in the state of Trujillo near the beautiful Andean city of Mérida. This great novelist has built a literary world charged with its own dense, marvelously invented reality whose point of departure has always been the imagination of the village elevated to its fullest potential; I still remember the pleasant and strong impression I had in 1991 of his first novel, La danza del jaguar.

Quintero is seen more and more as an essential writer, but the recognition of his work has been slow, due to an infinity of reasons, among which we might include the cultural drift of a Venezuela isolated from the rest of the world and also the fact that he belongs to the category of what Fabían Casas, speaking of Bolaño, called “writers from before,” in other words, he belongs to the category of those who were never simply writers, but also points of connection between life and literature, lighthouses where young people cans see themselves reflected. Quintero is one of those “writers from before,” and it’s possible that, in the long run, being far away from the media spotlight was beneficial for him, because it allowed him to accede to the ideal of certain noble novelists: to become pure text, to be strictly a literature.

At the center of his most recent novel, El amor es más frío que la muerte (Candaya), there’s a moment when the narrator, the writer from before, “the stateless one,” hero of women (in the manner of Adolfo Bioy Casares, but with a Japanese influence), observes that a rock has the shape of a tomb and it reminds him of Procrustes’s bed. A bed of stone, he thinks. And he lies down face-up on the cold slab and says he feels comfortable, serene like a king in a house for all time. That intense instant of the novel could hold the absolute key to the eternal, dynastic body that Quintero’s texts enthrone in the history of literature for all time; one could say the Venezuelan is in tune with that famous outburst by Pierre Michon in Corps du roi, where we’re told the monarch has two bodies: one eternal, dynastic, that the text exalts and consecrates, and which we arbitrarily call Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett; and another mortal, functional, relative body, the rag, that moves towards carrion; who’s called, and is only called Dante, and wears a little cap he pulls down toward his flat nose; or he’s just called Joyce and wears eyeglasses, or he’s called Shakespeare and is an affable and robust rentier with an Elizabethan gorget.

7.16.2017

A considerable and diverse group of writers, professors, intellectuals and artists have written a document about the current Venezuelan situation, offering a reflection on the already evident dangers of Maduro’s totalitarian tendencies, while also invoking the paths of understanding and plurality, with a particular accent on the value of the humanities and education for the country to come.

At a moment of economic, social and political crisis, it occurs to the President of the Republic —after delaying regional elections and torpedoing the convocation of a recall referendum— to invent a so-called National Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente) of a clearly fraudulent, mendacious and spurious nature. Given the circumstances, after more than one hundred days of continuous protests on the streets of Venezuela, it is a civilian concern to insist over and over again on the inconvenience and irresponsibility of that convocation, especially by a unilateral government, incapable of producing consensus, or sense, and much less confidence, among Venezuelans. Added to these concerns is the brutal, indolent and systematic repression executed by the Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana), among other shock troops, whose violent nature is more than clear. We are facing a massacre, especially of young people, executed with shocking and cold precision by the State. In many cases, the victims themselves, through social media, have documented these abuses.

As expected, because of the government’s dictatorial nature, it manipulates the constitution and uses public powers for its own convenience, as well as creating a “commission” —made up of their own, their most radical— to advance the constituent simulacrum it’s trying to sell. There is a considerable variety of arguments from the legal world that reveal overwhelming clarities about the unconstitutional nature of that imposition. One substantial symptom, within this chaotic process, is found in the continuous breaks and criticisms that have emerged within Chavismo itself, all of which announce clear signs of a fracture; and why not, maybe even of a crisis of consciousness within those groups that assume a loyalty to the constitution of 1999, with whom we must join forces, given that now is not the time for partisan battles, nor minor differences, but instead the time to defend and give an impulse to a country where all the different and even antagonistic postures can coexist democratically. The list of these ruptures within Chavismo would be too long to enumerate, but the most evident one is led by the current Attorney General of the Republic, Luisa Ortega Díaz, and her recent declarations. In the National Electoral Council, actually, opinions are also divided, judging by the interventions of the elections official Luis Emilio Rondón.

The president and his men only want to entrench themselves in power, gain more time, avoid legal elections and take back by force the seats in the National Assembly they weren’t able to obtain with votes so they can permanently install themselves in power. They propose to make a suit for themselves to help install a project that will keep the entire country under submission. Now the so-called best constitution in the world, the one that would last one hundred years, according to certain pompous pronouncements during these terrible years, from one day to the next is no longer convenient for them. This reveals a type of government that [mistakenly] calls itself “progressive” and is only sustained by brute force, wanting to lead Venezuela once again to the times of our worst military regimes.

Because of all this, our goal is to generate spaces for democratic encounters, carrying out articles 333 and 350 of the current Constitution, demanding from the opposition leadership —including new leaders, in the process of conformation— that they provide the first signals for achieving a peaceful and democratic transition, urgent general elections, the renewal of public powers, the freeing of all political prisoners, the disarming of violent groups and the consequent call for the conformation of a project for a plural country, based on the possibilities found in the current Constitution, just as they also take urgent economic measures that won’t affect the people, help stop the repression, allowing the identification by the Attorney General’s office of those responsible for these crimes, supporting the guarantee of the right to protest and move about at will, and the right to a quality education.

Let this also be an opportunity to note that culture will have to play a fundamental role in the country to come. We’re not talking about another round of circumstantial appointments and ministerial powers, but rather reflections and proposals for attaining spaces for understanding the nature of our situation and destiny as Venezuelans. Education, from its first moments until the university, should be prominent in the formation of citizens critical of any abuse of power, conscious of how important it is to defend democratic values, as well as considering the historic, continental and global climates they form part of as citizens, with the freedom to decide and to develop in a country that doesn’t flood the younger generations in blood and death, as the current government now does.

In sum: the country to come should think, among other urgent elements, about the importance of culture in the educational process of Venezuelans. That’s why we think the word should be action and reflection, a path for expressing what has been assaulted within us, what could provide an outlet for both pain and thought, to the rational and the irrational. We sustain that the word is not an emptiness, it is the royal and common way to justice, understanding, solidarity and responsibility.

There’s no more time to lose: the street should be the way to recover our citizenship. A street whose only end should be the return of democracy and freedom for Venezuelans. Let the doors of transition open up definitively.

7.10.2017

Writing something torrential and dazzling
The memory of that region makes me be humble
Like the sun we declined towards the horizon
Traveling through hallucinated territories
In the mirror of the summer the rusty
Extension of a planet
Amidst meadow garden pastures
We star in an unknown spring
But in that region appeared the only
Solitary splendor
The weather was exploding in the araguaney trees
No other fire was ever as golden
Solitude silence immensity
Were forging their cholera within
Like saying their patience
They were not patinas but brusque
Shinning swords of time
There was no more sun in that sunny twilight
No more sky
Immortal falconry still flying in memory
Those birds of gold

6.27.2017

He had wandered through that city under another sky
He was overwhelmed by innocence
His face was the unknown
He was breathing an insolent perfume on the streets
The mirror behind desire
Dealing with sadness made him rebellious
He lived not in abandonment but solitude
Every journey would displace him
The sun that revolves at night
Who was burning behind its fire
No face no name
Only the origin the language of death
This is how he watched his dreams burn
“Father, these ashes”

6.24.2017

Neither the light nor the sky directly
Awareness the only thing budding in those branches
The other sun
What is compact has become a slanted glimmer
Leaves pruned by the wind
The summer’s radiant tail passes between us
The ambushed panthers are there at night
Thousand-eyed swamp suddenly illuminated
Feathers of a great bird standing on end
The sacred terror in the creaking wooden house of my childhood
The original density of language
Its murmuring silence of silent glowing
Up above your glance ripples
The only mirror where I find my abyss

6.06.2017

We will burn far from that fire
from that land
I had promised you.
Shameful maybe.
But full of disgrace is the air
I breathe.
Tangled in the monsters
that knit my dreams together
I no longer take requests.
I dispose of what disposes me.

5.22.2017

Fog is transitory. It can cover up a landscape but never erase it. There’s always something behind it: a room, a body we love... or flags, as in the poem by José Watanabe:

I was listening to the soft pummeling of the waves
on the sides of the small boats
that would leave at dawn to gather nets
crossing between the war ships stationed in the bay.
An abandoned dog at the bottom of a boat, as blind
as me, was whimpering.

Then I saw flags that someone, in the distance, waved
behind the fog.

I was stunned speechless. No footnote
on beauty could actually speak of those flags.

This selection of contemporary Venezuelan poets, present and absent, tries to expose what’s behind the fog (and smoke). These are voices that remain in the very reality of each poem, in its contexts and images. The flag of a country covers everyone: with no trace of patriotism, it’s a blanket that warms you, so ample it might dim the darkness.

In all of them, we see the flag express itself, gesticulate. It stands out. There it is.

—Ediciones Letra Muerta, Caracas, April 2017

A COUNTRY
~Rodolfo Moleiro

This peak of the mountain
is for reducing the morning to planes.

We’ll bring down
two invincible balls,
one towards the plains,
the other one to the sea.

They’ll travel centuries of distance
leaving elongated fronds
of golden dust and foam.
At each of the bus stops
we’ll fix posts of air.

And at the level of this peak,
on a solid base of clouds,
we’ll lift up a country
with stones and sheets of dawn
for the birds and for us.

☙

MAGMA
~Yolanda Pantin

The shores
of these rivers.

Same as the flow
of the human swarm
deluging the country
that birthed us.

“Come back tomorrow.”

But outside,
between the buses,
and cars vomiting,

a river passes.

It’s the affluence
of the hour.

And the sun.

And grief.

And the child juggler.

☙

MANDELSTAM
~Rafael Cadenas

I live
to whom do I owe this honor?

My soul falters. Dante is with me
through the Soviet night.

I wander amidst the ruins
of the Hélade.

I can’t escape.
Hide
the poems, Nadezda. Hurry.

How could you, César,
destroy
our vivacity?

I have abandoned all hope
at the entrance to the camp.

The only one who speaks Russian
couldn’t forget.
A god forgives,
a semi-god doesn’t.

The screams
are lost in the vastness of my country.

☙

MARVELOUS COUNTRY IN MOTION*
~Víctor Valera Mora

Marvelous country in motion
where everything advances and reverses,
where yesterday is an impulse or a farewell.

And whoever doesn't know you
says you’re an impossible lawsuit.

You are mocked so often
yet your feet are joyful.

You will be free.

If the damned
do not arrive at your shores
you will go to them as other days.

I begin and I believe in you,
marvelous country in motion.

* (Translated by Anne Boyer & Guillermo Parra)

☙

UNTITLED
~Antonia Palacios

They’ll take all my belongings, all the offerings. The ones that arrived lifted in garlands and branches, ones that collapsed lavishing themselves, ones that remained in suspense, ones left behind for such long fatigues, ones of learned form, stable touch. They’ll arrive battling on top of things, on top of the old approximations, forgotten approximations, rolling ruins over land, the tangle barely begun, the pearl barely mounted. They will arrive fiercely, they will arrive with hatred, they will arrive with scorn proclaiming the void. They will strip me of everything: point, gesture, voice. They will suddenly appear amid circles, angles and rectangles, hard geometries of agonizing lines, infinite parallels without possible encounters, volumes of blood. They will strip me of everything, of the air, of the reflection, of the form. The hour will be concave, the sky will be concave, the earth will open its concave crater in the final offering.

☙

AGAINST HOSTILE SPACE
~Alfredo Silva Estrada

1.

The days have slowly been losing their fear

Sometimes, it’s true,
The splendor is disrupted by fog
—Meridians of chaos
Amid the pestilent smoke of any old city—

But shelter is still needed
In the vacant lot

And this beating of words

And eyes that ask
Meditated balances of a star

Not like the disheveled beggar in his rags
And even not knowing how the days lash us
When people sing without pain
The variations of light
Over the poverty of any old city

☙

UNTITLED
~Harry Almela

there is no key
that works

nor lock

what approaches
are times
of indigence

the just
are left
outside

those who wished
to impose
their word

those who believed
they could order
our modesty

slavery
makes us immune

there are no
ash marks
on the doors

no broken flag
with a half moon
or star

☙

11
~Franklin Hurtado

teach me how to run

when they loose the dogs
or you break the window
while batting stones

teach me how to eat
the pulp with the shell

I still haven’t
become
a shade

teach me how to fight

I’ll hide in the tank
so they can’t hear me
while you prepare
the row of fists

kill them all

don’t leave me alone
they’ll tear me apart
and the heat doesn’t help

courage is keeping
your face above water

☙

ANOTATIONS
~Jorge Gustavo Portella

Maybe a little like today, the blues in the sky are dying. The horses surround us expectantly, producing a thunder of clicks and clacks. Weapons. Shouts. Vanquish, victory, viva! No one remembers the dead after the battle.

Pain is a stone, a thousand stones carved with unknown faces that force us. It’s a barren town of wounded soldiers. There is a deaf demand in each sad neighborhood, a solution to the trash, the neglect. A need. Die Bolívar, die.

☙

SOLIDARITY
~Rubén Darío Carrero

I awoke afraid
with eyes closed.

I dreamed I was the day,
the walls the whole time behind the sofa,
the solitude of sugar in cold water,
the door stuck in the heat
and rice vapor at noon.

The day wasn’t what I was.
No.
The windows were open,
the mirrors rose in the unlit elevator,
I was listening to them,
and the drops fell from the clothes
still wet
hanging
in the reflection of the hands and clouds in the water.

The sun was a cemetery of buildings.

I was speaking asleep from the dream
and the school on the corner
was also speaking
and I learned how to cross the street,
become multitude
that breaks the locks
and the eye of the door,
the windows, the table.

The television
lit with images, events
and the newscaster’s voice
imperceptible
in the head’s
street vendors
or in the national anthem
after the movie,
naked women
and the statue in front of the children
the next day
docile
the horse,
white and male.

The school was a hospital without bandages or stretchers.

It’s three in the morning
and it wasn’t the body
in the morgue
asleep
still.
No.
Suffering.

The crowd
waving flags
while everyone dies.
Everyone
dead
because they woke up early,
went to school,
worked,
were born,
lived.

You cross the street
with your eyes
without any eyelids
smiling
with your enamored hand.

☙

CITY
~María Clara Salas

Observe the city
the daring of its roofs
built randomly
tending to slide
into mud
and death

Fearlessly
the children raise their kites
with no hesitation
running up and down
thousands
of stairs

From above
the city contemplates us
from above
our fate is decided

☙

ROCK URBANO
~Julio Miranda

we wake for one more morning
we’re the survivors
the city has been good to us
one more night

but what a night: the man was screaming
drunk or terrified and maybe both
—now we’ll never know—
they wanna kill me, those guys
they wanna kill me, call the police
they wan (while: shut up, man, the others
were saying, with chilling softness)
and two thousand, three thousand neighbors squatting
we were in the tall buildings listening
in silence
(a single enormous contained breathing)
(an enormous trembling army)

everyone wanting the man to shut up
someone kill him or not, but shut him up
they should liquidate him somewhere else far away
or maybe it’s been a sinister joke
but he should shut up or someone should shut him up now

and he shut up
and this morning in the elevators no one looked at anyone
and on the sidewalk there were no corpses or blood stains
and the newspapers ignore the matter
and so do we

☙

UNTITLED
~Antonio González Lira

They know everything comes true,
that’s why the cross themselves
even when they’re done
at the end of the day

they know
what’s spread in the sereno
is no feat to be drowned
in the remnants of the night

that blind,
from the bell tower
sprouts the owl
with a lament of auguries
to invite terror

disrespect the tranquility
gathered in the dark mouth
of the muted chandelier

that carries in its lugubrious wings
a town that at this hour
doesn’t know

there’s nowhere to stay

☙

POSSIBLE START
~Igor Barreto

By changing the place of the symbols
the destruction of the country began.
The image
went completely black.
People are still scared
and shyness is so close to ire.
How do we make what happened
intentionally disappear?
Maybe
another man will come
with great power over fate.
We should recover
a greater sense.
We still have pieces of the house:
a door exists
and what’s missing
will return.

In the unmovable
Over doubts and certainties,
I cross the line of my development.

Of going out and crossing the city
The perplexity of things in vigil

To dominate excess, to virginal impulse in the dust of
origin
Of going out and crossing the city
To climb and descend the wall
Follow the human tinge
By bare effort
For dual unity
The pupil profits under nameless mystery.

In dissertating sea shanties to evade without suspicious
accord and arch
All the way to cold sound.

☙

«Detrás de la niebla» is a selection of Venezuelan poetry from the team of Ediciones «Letra Muerta». The selected poems belong to the collections and anthologies of each author. The transcription and revision of the texts was under the care of Néstor Mendoza and Graciela Yáñez Vicentini. The header was designed by Samoel González Montaño, based on an archive photograph of the Guaire river.

4.20.2017

“Cancer is a wonderful thing.” That’s how Swallowing Stones begins, an ironic portrait of a Venezuelan ex-guerrilla fighter in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, written by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán.

The novel isn’t very well known. It was never translated into Spanish. And it has the particularity of having a narrator who isn’t a fictional character. The character, who physically looked like a shorter Einstein who never stopped gulping down water, who travelled from Trujillo to Germany to study with Martin Heidegger, who was an ideologist for so many guerrilla movements around the world, who lived to be an old man on some corner in Caracas.

His name is Oswaldo Barreto. And today, a few days after his death, I still don’t understand why his adventures are so unknown. “I brought Todorov to Venezuela once,” he mentioned when we met, after I told him I study Literature. I hadn’t even been able to ask him, astonished, about his friendship with Roque Dalton and Régis Debray or for having allegedly hijacked an airplane, or any number of stories that could have been narrated by Adriano González León in his 1968 novel País Portátil.

Maybe he wasn’t interested in being anything other than a professor —at the Central University of Venezuela, the University of the Andes and at the University of Havana—. It’s true that as a member of the French Communist Party and the Armed Forces of National Liberation, he participated alongside Teodoro Petkoff in Venezuela’s guerrilla movement, he was a mediator for Cuba and Algeria while the African nation was seeking its independence and he resisted the coup against Allende in Chile.

But in the country that had recently been established by Fidel, he was known as el profe [the professor], a role he assumed proudly. “I’m less extraordinary than the myth says I am,” the alter ego of Swallowing Stones insists, while qualifying his wanderings all over the world as “a comedy of errors,” and finding peace in being an academic. Not everyone, no matter their talent and fame, wants to be the face of change; some people prefer to think it.

Maybe his personality reduced him to the margins of our history. In one of the few books that mentions him, the Diaries of Ángel Rama, he’s characterized as “the prototype of the revolutionary garrulousness of bars.” This was in reaction to a devastating critique Oswaldo had written about an homage to Léopold Sédar Senghor by the Uruguayan critic.

I had myself tried proposing to him a translation of St. Aubin de Terán’s novel. And he said no, because he insisted that people tend to confuse fiction with reality in Venezuela, and he didn’t want to see himself caught up in dilemmas about his past. Later on I wanted to interview him for a compilation of interviews with ex guerrilla fighters that I once hoped to write; but he was impassive with each question —he judged them as imprecise, based on citations that were taken out of context and poorly-understood concepts—. In the end, all the projects I came up with to give Barreto more visibility failed, which didn’t seem to bother him much.

Notwithstanding, he couldn’t have been any other way. The incisiveness of his personality went hand in hand with his critical vocation. There was a great deal of disenchantment around him during his life, and he never faltered when it came time to point that out.

Rama may have considered him another generic product of the República del Este, but Oswaldo accused Juan Calzadilla, Edmundo Aray and Daniel González of having betrayed the ideals of the 1960s literary group El Techo de la Ballena when they sided with Chavismo.

The times I accompanied him to the Gran Café in Sabana Grande, he never stopped lamenting the miserable conditions of the women who sell mango jelly on the street, and he couldn’t stop complaining about the bad interpretations of a friend of his: Che.

His house, by the way, was chaos. Although the sum of jouneys that defined him and all the disillusions he carried explain the disorder of his books and kitchen. “Why this brusque home, half outside, half inside?” Paul Celan, a poet of his preference, asked himself once. And the question goes with his cave in the San Bernardino neighborhood of Caracas. How could he not live amidst ruins with children in Germany, France, Iran and several failed revolutions behind him?

“What is a revolutionary intellectual? The person who wants to change things thanks to words,” said Debray in an interview Oswaldo conducted with him in 1997. I think reflections such as this one influenced him to drop his weapons and eventually become a columnist for the newspaper Tal Cual.

This, along with his work as a teacher and researcher for the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies. More than ever, in a decade when radical change seems like a commonplace thing, we should research his archive and separate fact from myth. So much disillusion and apprenticeship shouldn’t remain a mere reference.

4.15.2017

I have sadly let my head rest
Under this shade that falls from the noise of your steps
A return to the other margin
Grandiose as the night to deny you
I have left my dawns and the trees rooted in my throat
I have even left the star that ran in my bones
I have abandoned my body
Like the shipwreck abandons the boats
Or like memory when the tide drops
Some strange eyes over the beaches
I have abandoned my body
Like a glove so the hand will be free
In case I have to hold on to the joyful pulp of a star
You don’t hear me lighter than the leaves
And not even the air can chain me
Nor the waters withstand my fate
You don’t hear me coming stronger than the night
And the doors that don’t resist against my breath
And the cities that grow silent so you won’t perceive them
And the forest that opens like a morning
That wants to hold the world in its arms
Beautiful bird fated to fall in paradise
The curtains have already fallen over your escape
My arms have already shut the walls
And the branches leaning over to block your way
Fragile doe fears the earth
The fences are already latched
Your forehead will now fall under the weight of my anxiety
Your eyes will now close over mine
And your sweetness will sprout you like new horns
And your kindness spread out like the shade that surrounds me
My head has stopped rolling
My heart I’ve let it drop
I have nothing else to make me know I’ll reach you
Since I have no hands to grab
From what’s been set aside to perish
Nor feet to weigh over such oblivion
Of dead bones and dead flowers
I might not reach the other margin
If we’ve already read the last sheet of paper
And the music has begun to braid the light you will fall into
And the rivers block your road
And the flowers call you with my voice
Big rose it’s time to stop
The summer sounds like an unfreezing in the hearts
And the dawns tremble like trees when they wake up
The exits are guarded
Big rose, won’t you fall?

3.25.2017

1. Flying on a moto taxi
2. Going into the radio station and hugging my friends
3. Having a coffee in a forgotten cafeteria
4. Enjoying a fragmented and jumpy conversation between four friends.
5. Recognizing spaces I travelled through so many years ago. Picking up my pieces there.
6. Playing hide & seek with the mountain.
7. Wandering in complete solitude and silence.
8. Returning to old malls, to walk through them, window shopping their stores.
9. Visiting bookstores I hadn’t been to before. Listening quietly while someone asks for my Hormigas en la lengua. Feeling my face turn red.
9. Slowly eating the sweet ají, catara picante and Araya salt flavors combined into one chocolate: the bon bons made by @cacaodeorigen
10. Granting myself the pleasure of sitting alone at a bar and enjoying several freezing tercio beers while I prepare a talk.
11. Being a city, being Caracas.

3.11.2017

Twenty-nine poets who awaken over the word. Twenty-nine young voices who in their unease, their predictions and anomalies offer the poem amidst a world falling to pieces. That’s the wager of the anthology Amanecimos sobre la palabra, curated and selected by the poet and editor Oriette D’Angelo and published recently by the organization Team Poetero.

The selections in this anthology draw, in the words of D’Angelo, a cartography that allows us to glimpse the new means of disseminating poetry on the Internet. The twenty-nine Venezuelan poets included have as a common denominator that their texts have come to life for the first time in cyberspace and their incipient literary projects are a click away through various digital magazines that make up today’s digital ecosystem.

The anthology of young Venezuelan poets offers a journey through the most diverse registers and topics, but always under the chaotic sign of contemporaneity, the complexity of a world where utopias have failed, and the cataclysm of a dismembered country.

The name of the anthology —explains the editor in the prologue— alludes to a verse by the poet Pablo Rojas Guardia, “used as an aesthetic banner by part of the Generation of 28.” For the poet and editor the anthology is also an homage to the poet and a recognition of digital media as promoters of new literature.

D’Angelo explains that thanks to her work as editor of the digital platform Digo.palabra.txt and to her interest in digital magazines she already knew many of the names of those that ended up forming part of the book.

“Despite knowing them, having read nearly all of them previously and recognizing their talent, I also wanted to focus on two things: the singularity of their poetic voices and that as many of Venezuela’s cities as possible be represented,” explained the editor, for whom it was important to show that the literary activities in places such as Maracaibo, Coro, Mérida and San Cristóbal are as “incredible” as those in the capital city.

The topics addressed by the young poets range from the most canonical in the Venezuelan poetic tradition, such as memory, the house, the city, the body; to those permeated by signs of the megabyte era and by less conventional structures that defy the act of reading.

For D’Angelo, “the desire to keep writing despite the lack of opportunities,” is what unites these singular voices. “All of them have interesting projects, some have magazines, participate in literary groups, organize readings and events. This generation, which includes me, ”has found it hard to start materializing their work. Very few of those included have their first book published, and it’s not because they haven’t written them, but because they depend on contests and prizes to do so,” D’Angelo assures.

The literary activities of these young poets are taking place and expanding behind computer and mobile screens. This ferment is one of the qualities D’Angelo wanted to highlight in the generation represented by the book.

She finds the interaction sparked by the Internet “interesting” in relation to poetic dissemination and creation. However she warns: “It’s quite easy to get carried away by the immediacy of the Internet. A poem getting 70 likes on Facebook doesn’t make it the poem of the century, but neither does getting 2 likes mean it’s bad. I’m not talking about those types of interactions, which are more superficial, I’m talking more about the process of dissemination, recognition and dialogue that can happen in this space between readers and writers.”

While it is an anthology, it only aims to be an “approximation” —the editor affirms—, to what’s currently happening in regards to poetry.

The book will be presented tomorrow in Caracas at Kalathos bookstore, at 12:30pm.

The two most prominent figures of modern Venezuelan poetry were born in the city of Cumaná, on Venezuela’s eastern coast. The older poet, Ramos Sucre, was born in 1890, and Blanco in 1906. Members of distinguished families from the Oriente region, their childhood homes are only a few blocks apart from each other. Fate, however, made sure they never met, despite the symmetries that link the lives of these bards: an inclination for the humanities, law studies at the University of Caracas, both of them poets. Additionally, they were linked in their diplomatic careers; one of them, Ramos Sucre, was a functionary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and Blanco, was a minister, a couple of decades later, of that same Ministry. And the gods also chose a death in exile for them. The first one in Geneva; in what is undeniably a suicide, afflicted as he was by the “vampire of melancholia.” And the second, in an improbable driving accident during his exile in Mexico. The symmetries end here, because nothing could be more divergent than the poetics that distinguished their work.

Ramos Sucre is rightfully considered Venezuela’s first modern poet; prose poems, impersonal, hermetic, learned, demanding, with an exquisite syntax and the insistence on the image as the basic instrument of expression. He wrote little and never for many, his style was that of Cellini and his exquisite goldsmith work. Andrés Eloy Blanco, for his part, didn’t quite propose to be a poet of modernity. It seemed better to him to take on a crepuscular post-Romantic aesthetic, expressed in conventional diction and traditional meters. Incapable of dissociating the poet from the politician, he aimed to be and undoubtedly he was a popular poet, within reach of large crowds and immediate recognition. He never seemed to identify with the attempts being put forth, not without exhaustion, by the best of his contemporaries to adapt the new expressive forms that had been disseminated for several decades in Europe or the United States.

They were born in Cumaná, two poets of antipodal expressions, despite the symmetries that might have brought them closer. Blanco is probably the poet most read by Venezuelans during the 20th century, although I’m not sure he’ll keep that position in the 21st century. While Ramos Sucre continues to be a strange figure whose readership is limited to universities and poets who recognize him as the founder of modern Venezuelan poetry.

Alejandro Oliveros, poet and essayist, was born in Valencia on March 1st, 1948. He founded and directed the magazine Poesía, published by the Universidad de Carabobo. He has published ten poetry collections including El sonido de la casa (1983) and Poemas del cuerpo y otros (2005). His books of essays include La mirada del desengaño (1992) and Poetas de la Tierra Baldía (2000).

2.26.2017

Between the day and its dreams,
the man, who could barely stand,
was walking alone.
He was walking in his mute desert.
Rising from the earth,
again and again,
the silence of the dead.
He was walking around and around
his own self.
A nameless exhaustion
haunted him. It insisted
circling over
his very own body.
He was carrying the prodigious weight
of an immense torture.
A dark secret made him twitch
and overshadowed his face.
It was moaning in the voice of the wind
crossing at that moment,
desolate, through the plateaus.
The man, just like
Jeremiah, was lamenting.
He looked into those
mirrors as if he were
seeing beyond the world.
He would, suddenly, reach the point
of an unstoppable gust of wind.
Now the man had just
passed through
without ever having arrived.

2.18.2017

He was looking for the first
and last time at his land.
The land that came from
within. He wanted to remain
there for all of eternity.
To be just another dead man,
among the rest of the deceased,
in the entire universe. In
repeated machine-like gestures,
he would search within himself
for something imaginary
without ever
finding it, and once again it was stirring
inside, like souls
in limbo, the portents,
and, funereal, they tormented him.
Alone, as if they were
a creaking, he might see some
fiery serpents
crossing through space.
He had lost his center
of gravity and couldn’t
find it anywhere. With his phantasmal
face, he was a shadow
amidst the shadows.
He was, likewise, whipped
to his very bones
by vertiginous lightning bolts
and hirsute tempests.